All posts tagged ‘Kickstarter’

About 18 months ago, inventor and father of three, Moshe Wiess was given an iPad as a gift and quickly fell in love with it. One thing he didn’t like however was the rather poor speaker and audio output, and soon found himself (much like everyone else has) cupping his hand over the speaker to bounce the sound waves out towards the front. He grew tired of having to operate the iPad effectively one-handed, so grabbed an old box, cut one side off of it and used a rubber band to secure it to his iPad. Hardly a pretty solution, but it’s from there that the idea for the SoundBender was born.

After an unsuccessful Kickstarter at the beginning of 2012, Wiess learnt his lessons and quickly tried again. This time he succeded in raising over $10,000 against a target of $4,500 and the SoundBender was put into production. The initial batch ran into a small problem with the integral magnets being aligned the wrong way around for some iPads, and Wiess had to replace some of them. It wasn’t the first gizmo of its kind or the last, but he got it out there. Then along came the iPad 2 with its sleeker design, requiring a new design and another Kickstarter – this time with a removable magnet that can be switched to match the polarity of the ones in your iPad, and stop it jumping off.

The SoundBender attaches magnetically over the speaker grill

The Soundbender itself is a very small bit of injection-moulded plastic and simply slips over the iPad’s speaker and is held there with the aforementioned magnet. If you do have one of the repelling ones, reversing the magnet in the SoundBender only takes a few seconds. It pops on and off very easily, but stays stuck when you need it to. I have one of Apple’s Smart Covers and with the SoundBender attached, it can still close pretty much as normal and put the device to sleep, but I don’t think it would work with some of the more bulkier covers available. However, it’s so small and easy to pop on and off, that it’s no problem to just remove it and take it with you.

The difference it can make to the audio output of the iPad is quite impressive. It doesn’t so much amplify the sound, but rather directs it more towards your ears. The high frequencies are much crisper and the bass seems fuller. It’s never going to replace a set of external speakers, but it’s perfect for watching videos and playing games. I have developed a ‘second-screen’ approach at my desk – keeping my Twitter, RSS feeds and other ‘distractions’ on the iPad whilst I work away on the iMac. Every now and then an interesting video pops up on YouTube and now I don’t have to bother putting on the headphones to hear the sound clearly. It also works perfectly well for when I’m catching up on my Doctor Who via the BBC’s iPlayer or streaming the IT Crowd on Netflix, but I’ll still dig out the cans when it’s the music that’s important.

The SoundBender is available now directly from thesoundbender.com in a variety of colours for $12.99 or from Amazon. GeekDad received an evaluation unit for the purposes of this post

James Ernest’s Kickstarter for his game Deadwood Studios USA closes next Tuesday, April 2nd, and there are still a few stretch goals to meet. In order to meet them, Ernest is offering his audience a costume contest of sorts. For his Kickstarter campaign for Unexploded Cow, Ernest showed up at PAX Prime in a cow costume asking for people to provide him with the means to explode. This time, Ernest is allowing his audience to vote on their preferred costume. The choices are: the cowboy, the cow, or the woman in a black dress. Ernest will be wearing whichever costume his backers support on International Tabletop Day this Saturday as he and his buddies go around the Seattle area attending events at local game stores. You have just a couple of days to vote for your favorite through Kickstarter, and, while you’re at it, pick up a copy of a really great game as well.

Finding a dungeon crawl adventure board game these days is not much of a challenge. The real difficulty is to find a cooperative dungeon crawl board game that doesn’t require one of the players to play against their friends as the dungeon master, crypt keeper, or overlord. I’m very excited to see that MERCS Miniatures is Kickstarting a new fully-cooperative dungeon crawl adventure game called Myth. In this game The Darkness (the generic name for the forces of evil) will be controlled by a unique set of rules governed by a Boss Deck (as featured in their Kickstarter game play video). It’s described on the Kickstarter page,

Players aren’t being driven by properties out of their control, nor are they being shepherded by a person whose skill has a direct impact on the enjoyment of the game.

This kind of cooperative game mechanic hits close to home for me. I have two groups of people that I play games within my circles. I have my friends that are highly competitive and we enjoy the head-to-head nature of most board games, tactical war-games, and the quasi-adversarial nature of a good RPG that pits players against the game master. But some some of my friends are a bit more casual in their approach to playing games. When it comes time to select our games they tend to gravitate towards the cooperative boardgames like Zombicide, Forbidden Island, or Lord of the Rings (Now printed by Fantasy Flight Games). In order to add variety to the game rotation I am always on the lookout for a new cooperative game.

The Kickstarter campaign has an initial funding goal of $40,000 (at the time of this post they should have met their initial funding goal) with nearly a full month to get enough supporters to hit the goal and reach the additional stretch goals. If their miniatures are anywhere close to the same caliber of their flagship skirmish game MERCS I’m going to be incredibly pleased. The Kickstarter promises hobby-quality models that are all based on the brilliant designs of Keith Lowe, the lead designer behind Myth and MERCS.

If you enjoy cooperative games to play with spouses, significant others, and casual gamers it may be worthwhile to vote with your wallet on this one. As an added benefit there are some pretty good stretch goals that have been announced on this project.

Encouraging people to play games in public is the focus of a couple current Kickstarter campaigns.

To celebrate the “big” games that brought the world to London in 2012, a UK game and experience design agency created a series of small, quick-to-understand games that could be played anywhere. Their simple rules were placed all over the city with three games in each of the 33 burroughs of London, turning buildings and sidewalks into game boards with human pieces.

Tiny Games is about to go digital with a Kickstarter campaign launching today and running through April 13. The app-to-be will provide access to the rules library by answering sometimes irreverent probing questions that attempt to match your current situation with a social game.

“The app might ask if you have certain things to hand, like a picnic blanket, an egg, or a small child,” explains Alex Fleetwood, founder and director of Hide&Seek. “I hope we’ll also ask some more impertinent questions, like: ‘Which one of you has the loudest voice?’ We’re trying to synthesise that very clever thing a games facilitator will do at one of our events where they size a group up and figure out how to get them playing.”

Stickers in Public, another Kickstarter project from Studio Cypher, ties games to particular places. Instead of a digital application, however, the games are concisely described on physical stickers that can be placed anywhere. The adhesive is re-usable, so placement can easily alter the context of the challenge. For $10, Kickstarter backers get a set of nine 3.5″ x 4″ sticker games.

Public games are a great way to enhance community and encourage a playful attitude. Closing one’s eyes and walking toward a diamond on a wall is an activity that can dramatically alter expectations and mood in a stuffy board room or a doctor’s waiting room. These game design firms believe in the benefits of play, which includes improved memory, increased job performance, and general happiness. The larger goal of both project is to help spread participation in and acceptance of local gaming. Continue Reading “It’s Fun Play in Public with Tiny Games” »

As schools across the country let out for spring break, cars are loaded with suitcases, airplane seats are ensured to be in their full upright positions, and families depart for a time of rest, relaxation, and vacation. But if your schedule (or budget) doesn’t allow for a cross country trip, maybe you and your family can take a virtual trip via a new board game currently being funded on Kickstarter.

Family Vacation is a game from Philip duBarry (designer of the popular Revolution, sold by Steve Jackson Games) and rewards players who can create the most fun-filled vacation for their in-game families. The game is for two to six players, is supposed to take between 45 and 60 minutes to play, and is meant for players age 10 and above. In reality, games can be played much more quickly than that and, with a little help, players as young as eight can probably play.

Gameplay is pretty straightforward, but allows for different strategies for earning happiness points, which determine who wins the game. Points are earned by doing activities that your family members enjoy. It might be a trip to a beach, a round of golf, a visit to an art museum, or one of a half dozen other interests randomly assigned to your family of four. Each activity you complete adds to the happiness of the certain family members (but certain activities, like shopping, can deduct happiness from other members of your in-game family).

Play begins by drawing a hometown card, which not only tells players what city they begin (and end) in, but also lists three secret monuments or attractions. A player must try to visit at least one of these locations during the course of the game because they are worth big points, but are only awarded to the first player who visits them.

Movement is simple; no dice rolling necessary. Each turn, a player may advance one space. If that landing spot is on the highway, all family members lose a happiness point because highway travel is boring. But when the family reaches a city, the fun begins and happiness climbs. Most cities are comprised of a number of activities that may match family members’ interests. Points are awarded or deducted based on each individual’s interest cards. Once that activity has been completed, it is covered up and can’t be done again for the duration of the game. This makes long games and contests with more players pretty challenging.

If a player moves to a covered space or one of the hometown cities that isn’t his own, she draws an adventure card. Adventure cards are mostly positive outcomes, sometimes negative, and sometimes an optional side mission. In many cities there are also photo spaces that include a token. A family that collects photo tokens is awarded points on a graduating scale, according to the number of tokens gained, at the end of the game.

Each player has a plane ticket that allows for a single trip at any point during the game. The player has to be in a city with an airport and travel to a city with an airport, but it is a great advantage and one to be saved for the right moment. There’s a bit of international travel, as well. Families can visit both Canada and Mexico and the first and second families in to each country get an extra bonus.

The end of the game is a bit of an unknown and doesn’t trigger until a family announces it has arrived home. The returning family has to have visited at least one of the attractions on its hometown card and, for that family, they are unable to travel and earn more points. However, the rest of the players have seven turns to continue their travel and earning of happiness points. The first team to arrive home (and any other team that returns home in the seven subsequent rounds) will earn a single happiness point per family member per round. After that seventh round, all vacations are officially over and points are added up. This includes each family member and any bonus points for photos, visited attractions, international travel, and, possibly, adventure cards.

While Family Vacation isn’t a high strategy game, it nicely fills the niche for casual family gamers who want to have a fun time together. While everyone is playing against each other, there are enough ways to earn points that the game doesn’t feel overly competitive, so players may have a more relaxing experience.

I enjoyed playing the game, but there are a few things I would like to see changed. Gameplay felt too much like “move here, collect points” and it would have been fun to introduce another element. My wife suggested adding some adventure cards that awarded points based on actual activities like singing a road trip song or (rather than just giving points for “naming animals for each letter of the alphabet”, actually make players play that game) or give points for every state capital they can name in 15 seconds.

Still, I appreciated Family Vacation‘s open ended gameplay and each time we played it, it felt like a new game. With the variety of hometown cards and random interests, we were forced to take different approaches each time. It’s difficult to day exactly what the game will end up looking like because the game we played was a prototype, but we especially liked the artwork. Family Vacation gave us +3 happiness.

Raising money is hard. Despite the proliferation of fundraising websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, the truth of the matter is that this newfangled crowdfunding still works best when you bring your own crowd. Just witness the Veronica Mars Movie Project, which hit its $2 million funding goal within 10 hours of launch. How? Well, this was a project that already had its own built-in fan base.

You may think that Kickstarter is where you can float an idea and see if there are enough people out there who believe in your idea to make it happen. To some extent, that is true — you have an idea for a book or album or game or marionette theater that has a minimum cost to produce, and you want to see if there are enough people who would pay for it to make it worth actually producing. Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing funding is exactly designed for this.

What you might not know is that indie music fans aren’t all checking Kickstarter all the time for cool music projects to fund. Those would be Kickstarter fans who are also like indie music. Same with readers, board game players, and marionette theater enthusiasts. If they don’t already know about Kickstarter, chances are they won’t stumble across your crowdfunding project unless you get them there. Continue Reading “Getting Schooled About Crowdfunding” »

The Gathering brings together many of the original Magic: The Gathering artists to celebrate the game’s 20th anniversary.

Believe it or not, Magic: The Gathering — the first and still bestselling collectible card game — is about to turn 20 years old. To celebrate, Jeff A. Menges — one of the original artists for the game’s beautiful cards — decided to drum up interest in a book of brand-new art created by the group of artists who banded together to decorate the first year’s worth of cards starting two decades back. Full Steam Press launched a Kickstarter to publish this book on February 26, and the drive has already raked in more than double its original goal of $32,000.

The drive for The Gathering, as the book is titled, wraps up on March 28, and it’s bound to cross a number of stretch goals between now and the finish, adding even more benefits to the backers. I took the chance to interview artist Pete Venters about the project.

“Morrox, Demon Prince of Goblins” by Pete Venters. The image combines his long history of goblins pieces with his Legends card “Hellfire.”

Pete Venters: A little background: While the idea of getting all the original Magic artists back together for a project had certainly been talked about by many of us over the years, it was Jeff A. Menges who took the iniative to track everyone down. He collected everyone in a Facebook private group to pitch to us the idea of an art book to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Magic: The Gathering. One of the things he really wanted, and what fired up everyone, was that the book would feature a brand-new painting from each of the contributing artists.

Jeff’s ensuring the book is laid out, printed and delivered in a timely fashion. I’m running the Facebook and Kickstarter pages, which is more of a full-time job than people might imagine.

Matt Forbeck: How did you manage to get permission from Wizards of the Coast for this book?

PV: We’d started thinking about the art book as something where Magic was recognized as part of our collective past but wasn’t directly addressed as we didn’t want to step on Wizards’ copyright “toes.” But eventually we reached a point where we said “Let’s just run it past Wizards and see if they’re good with this.” They were.

They’ve actually been remarkably supportive and all we had to do was ensure they had some oversight. After all, we’re playing in their sandbox.

“The Conflict Continues” by Ron Spencer, a retrospective of a variety of his works.

MF: How did you select the artists? Was there anyone who wasn’t able to join you?

PV: Jeff set the parameters. There were some that wanted it to just be the Alpha artists and there were those, like me, who wanted to expand the list out to Ice Age, that was released in mid ’95. It was decided that the artists would be selected from those who were working within the first year of the game, so an artist had to have a card in print by the end of ’94 to qualify.

It was hard having a cut-off, but there had to be a line in the sand somewhere. And since the book was for Magic‘s 20th anniversary, taking an artist selection that was almost a snapshot of those working in Magic by the end of 93 seemed to make sense. We tried to contact everyone. Most were very enthusiastic, a couple weren’t interested and unfortunately at least one couldn’t take part due to poor health.

MF: Who was the hardest artist to track down?

PV: Well, I think there may still be a couple we could never find, but the hardest artist to track down — who we did eventually find — was none other than Anson Maddocks, one of the major contributors to the first year of Magic. He’d moved to another town, barely used email, and the only phone number any of us had for him was an old one! We caught up with him by sheer luck.

“Urborg Unleashed” by Bryon Wackwitz, based off the Legends card “Urborg.”

MF: Is there any chance for backers to choose to take delivery at Gen Con instead?

PV: We’re shooting for a September release so it’s unlikely. However, if we manage to run ahead of schedule we’ll definitely consider it. One of our big goals with this Kickstarter is to not disappoint people with unfulfilled promises, so we won’t commit to it unless we know we can do it.

MF: What would be the best event to go to if you wanted to collect signatures in your book?

PV: The artists are so spread out across the country that it’s hard to say. September seems so far away! However, if I was a betting man, I’d put money on something happening somewhere in Seattle as we have a very high number of Magic artists in the area, which is not surprising since this is also home to Wizards of the Coast.

“The White Tree” (seen here for the first time) by Randy Asplund, based off “Elven Fortress” from Fallen Empires.

MF: The Kickstarter has done well so far, blasting past all sorts of goals. Is there any chance for a sequel book, one that could include later Magic artists?

PV: It’s not impossible, but one of the things about that very early group of artists was that they all started before the game was big and all lived through the bizarre times of its exponential growth where we each went from being just another freelance artist to being the peeps with huge autograph lines. That sudden stardom was a shared experience and there’s still a bond there, a little community of artists who lived through the craziest of times. So, while a book featuring later artists is not out of the question, I think there may be more chance of other projects featuring this old guard. But let’s get The Gathering out the door first!

Disclaimer: I’m friends with a number of the artists who worked on this book, and I just completed writing a year’s worth of Magic: The Gathering comics for IDW.

We at GeekDad have contributed to, and written about, lots of different Kickstarter campaigns, and probably for games more than anything else. And now our very own Senior Editor Jonathan Liu has launched a Kickstarter game campaign of his own, and it’s not a stretch to say it doesn’t look like any game I, and I’m willing to bet you, have ever seen before.

Called Emperor’s New Clothes, the game lets you play the various participants in the classic Hans Christian Andersen tale of the same name. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to play it, but the naked brilliance of the design is undeniably thought-provoking. To enhance the game’s attractiveness, Liu has enlisted the help of a number of very talented game artists, including GeekDad favorite John Kovalic, and the result is art that is truly out of sight.

Besides sounding like a lot of fun to play, the game offers an innovative design feature I’ve never encountered before: Regulated Operator Optical Screening, or the curiously-pronounced ROOS for short. The ROOS system, developed by Wysiayg Press, adds a unique feature to the game materials which enhances their appearance to those people who are most likely to enjoy the game while making them appear entirely blank to non-gamers and gamers for whom the game may not be appropriate. Of course, all of us on GeekDad have no trouble seeing the materials as they really are, and I trust that the majority of our readers will be the same. See the video about ROOS at the end of this article.

The Emperor’s New Clothes Kickstarter campaign is off to a really good start, having raised nearly twice its funding goal of $5,000 — and hit four of its stretch goals — with 18 days left to go. It’s been getting some good attention in the press, and it’s received validation in the form of a page on BoardGameGeek.com, though it seems some of the articles were written by those blanked by the ROOS. If they want to do their impression of the doubting child of the story, that’s their business; as for me, I’ve contributed to the campaign myself and I’m content to remain among the privileged ones who can see the stark genius behind the game. I don’t know you, gentle reader, but I suspect you are, too.